Dead Souls
by Nikolai Gogol
Summary
Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov arrives in a provincial Russian town and sets about a scheme so odd that nobody quite believes it: buying up "dead souls," the serfs who have died since the last census but remain on the tax rolls, and therefore still cost their owners money, until the next official count. Landowners who think him mildly insane are happy to sell him their dead serfs for almost nothing, and Chichikov's real plan, never stated outright, is to mortgage this paper population of the dead as if they were living collateral and walk away with the loan. Gogol sends him from estate to estate, and each landowner he visits is a distinct comic type carved to the bone: the saccharine Manilov, the club fisted Sobakevich, the suspicious widow Korobochka, the reckless liar Nozdryov, and the miser Plyushkin, whose house has rotted around his hoarded junk. Rumours eventually catch up with Chichikov faster than his scheme does, and he flees the town in his carriage as the book ends, or rather stops, mid conception of the larger design Gogol never finished.
Gogol called it a poem rather than a novel, and the prose earns the label, veering constantly into digression, apostrophe and satire of provincial Russia's greed and vanity, funniest exactly where it is bleakest. The book is unmistakably unfinished business: what survives of part one is a complete comic engine, and a reader should know going in that the promised redemption of Chichikov in a planned continuation never arrived.
Gogol burned the manuscript of the second volume shortly before his death in 1852, and only fragments have survived to be reconstructed in later editions.
Historical Context & Significance
Published in 1842 as The Wanderings of Chichikov, or Dead Souls, the book landed as both comedy and indictment of a serf economy that let a man's worth be counted and traded on paper after he was dead, a satire of Russian society under Nicholas I sharp enough that censors initially balked at the title. It has since become a fixture of the Russian canon, regularly set beside Don Quixote and Dickens's Pickwick Papers for its picaresque structure and gallery of comic types.
Vladimir Nabokov, not an easy critic to satisfy, wrote at length in praise of Gogol's prose style and use of grotesque comic detail, and the book's central word, poshlost, meaning a kind of smug spiritual vulgarity, has become shorthand in Russian criticism for exactly the mediocrity Gogol was hunting. The novel ends mid sentence in its unfinished portion, a formal echo, whether intended or not, of Sterne's Sentimental Journey.